Rise, Grind, Die

The other month my Uber driver tried to sell me life insurance. This was unnerving considering he was operating a famously dangerous vehicle (Tesla) and because he made it clear that he was personally very well insured. As the adage goes, never be the least insured person in a Tesla.

As he explained his side hustle, enumerating the wondrous benefits of taking out a policy, it became clear that this particular operation was, at best, a multilevel-marketing scheme (think, hot moms selling Mary Kay) and, at worst, a total scam (think, hot moms selling Mary Kay.) However, at the end of the day, he was driving an expensive car, so I thought it would be worthwhile to investigate. I quickly discovered that it wasn’t just Uber drivers who are hawking life insurance: social media influencers have gotten in on the same racket.

Simply put, a life insurance policy is a contract between a policyholder and an insurance company, in which the former usually pays a regular premium to the latter, who, in the event of the policyholder’s death, pays out a “death benefit” to a designated beneficiary. These can range from as little as $1,000 up to millions of dollars. Today, half of Americans have life insurance—or half of Americans don’t have life insurance, depending on who you ask. Some policies are designed to help cover funeral costs (because we have a whole industry that profits off of death rituals), while some are intended to cover debts incurred by the deceased (because the banks will haunt you long after you depart this mortal coil). Others act simply as a form of income replacement for surviving family members.

Life insurance has a long history, dating back to ancient Rome, where “burial clubs” helped cover the cost of members’ funeral expenses. In some ways, these clubs functioned as a loose form of mutual aid, where people who otherwise were structurally excluded from wealth-building could gain some financial protections. In the mid-eighteenth century, religious leaders took up the same idea in establishing the Presbyterian Ministers’ Fund, which helped the widows and children of ministers. By the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, door-to-door salesmen traveled through American towns, selling policies across kitchen tables. Smelling an opportunity for greater profit, larger companies turned small life insurance firms into financial behemoths by developing ever more complex—and exploitative—policies. In 1906, the New York Senate took notice and released the Armstrong Report, which characterized many of these conglomerates as “a potent cause of evils” that acted in “reckless pursuit of new business.” Even though regulation tried to curtail some of these abuses, the life insurance industry adapted, and grew bigger still.

Today, policies are often sold without a clear disclosure of fees and risks, of which there are many. Policies can have administrative costs, mandatory commissions for the agent, and “surrender” fees that can apply for many years after purchase. Poorer Americans regularly pay more than wealthy Americans because they tend to have higher “risk profiles” and pay premiums in smaller, costlier installments. Across income brackets, Americans spend an enormous amount every year in individual life insurance premiums—$16.2 billion in 2024—making the industry a juggernaut.

That the industry would eventually adopt something of a MLM structure doesn’t come as much of a surprise. As Bridget Read writes in Little Bosses Everywhere, MLM seemed like the “simple, inevitable, yet monumental evolution of the traveling salesman, a figure so familiar and harmless he seems to be part of America’s DNA.” While there are certainly life insurance companies that still have traditional business models and employ salaried employees, the late twentieth century saw a boom of Independent Marketing Organizations (IMOs) and direct sellers. IMOs connect agents with insurance carriers and often operate through multitiered hierarchies where agents earn commissions from their own sales, plus “overrides” from everyone they recruit. In 2023, independent distribution accounted for about 53 percent of U.S. individual life insurance premiums sold.

Where these direct sellers might once have worked door-to-door or over the phone, firms like Primerica and World Financial Group are now recruiting aspiring influencers to help sell their wares, and recreate their own pyramid where most American’s eyeballs are glued for hours a day: social media feeds. In posts on these companies’ accounts, potential recruits are instructed in the tricks of the trade: sign up, buy leads, sell policies, market your success online—and then enlist others to do the same.    

Young, lower-tier influencers—people with followers numbering in the thousands, not hundreds of thousands—are particularly vulnerable to buying into an operation like this, in part out of a desperation to go viral. They have been sold the idea that thirty seconds of fame can lead to a stable career, leading 57 percent of American teens to claim they would like to be an influencer when they grow up. The truth is that success as an influencer is, at best, fleeting and, at worst, unachievable. Barriers to sustaining attention—from algorithm churn to market saturation—act as hurdles to achieving anything resembling stability. Among those who work full time as creators and influencers, over half make less than a living wage, though those in the top 6 percent pull down over $200,000 a year. Highly exploitable young workers in an unregulated gig economy, in other words, make for ideal marks.

Take @jonah.lewis, for example. Jonah is the self-described CEO of Prosper Agencies and purports to make almost $2.5 million a month in sales. On his Instagram, he preaches to his eighteen thousand followers, frequently without a shirt, about the importance of “vitality” and warns about the mirage of “free lunches.” You might expect to see him touting the benefits of life insurance policies, but instead there is only exercise porn, luxury cars, and paeans to the grindset. Prosper Agencies is a part of the Pinnacle Life Group Insurance Independent Marketing Organization, which claims to have three thousand agents as part of their broader network. Though significant, this is small compared to the tens of thousands at the likes of Primerica or World Financial Group. When I tried to reach out to Jonah and other individuals who were part of similar organizations, I typically got some variation of: “u looking for an opportunity?”

The message is clear: join my downline and you can live like this too. The fundamental problem is that success often depends far more on recruitment than actually selling insurance, and performing as an influencer has proved to be a powerful recruitment tactic. In this new era of recruiting and sales, everything is about a robust social media presence. In fact, many agents claim that regular posts about their fabulous lives are mandatory. Sometimes, you have to post before you even get paid.

Agents could make commissions on policies they personally sell, but in these organizations, the real money comes from collecting overrides on their recruits. For most, even that income is not going to grant access to the good life. At the curiously named People Helping People, for example, 44 percent of paid agents earned under $1,000 for the entire year in 2022, and another 31 percent made only between $1,000 and $5,000. That’s roughly three in four active agents making less than $5,000 annually. In this environment, there are perverse incentives. Agents are encouraged to recruit aggressively without considering anyone’s chance of success because, no matter how it shakes out, every person in their downline generates income for them. This is because they receive override commissions on any policy their recruits sell, even if that recruit ultimately earns little or loses money after expenses. Meanwhile, agents at the bottom of the totem pole bear massive costs of training materials, licensing, and buying expensive leads (they can cost from roughly $20 to more than $150 per contact) that even industry guides claim only convert into sales 2-5 percent of the time. So for every person online broadcasting windfalls, there are likely dozens of new agents subsidizing that payday.

Consider, too, @kingdomclosers. More than just insurance agents, they are lifestyle influencers, albeit of a different flavor: faith based. In the caption of a reel showing images of a family dressed up in their Sunday best and professional photos of young office workers celebrating a win, Kingdom Closers writes: “With the right mentors, mission and model, we’re transforming the marketplace by inspiring leaders to follow Christ to fulfill the Great Commission (Matthew 28:19).” They promise potential converts that this is a business model where “your income is unlimited.” Their current follower count? 177.

This phenomenon tracks with the bent of many MLMs. Mary Kay, for instance, still touts their credo of “God first, family second, career third.” High returns for the devout? Well, that’s just the will of our creator! This spiraled into New Thought Spiritualists. These devotees coined the term “the law of attraction,” an idea that runs rampant on modern lifestyle influencers‘ feeds. Lifestyle influencers and MLMs of all kinds share a common aesthetic and ideology, their boundaries often blurring in ways that allow them to reinforce one another.

Aspiring lifestyle influencers are modern-day Gatsby cosplayers, engaged in a relentless performance of wealth—which is little more than bait for consumers scrolling their feeds. Maintaining this enviable image requires money, and that requires increasingly aggressive monetization. Consider @Officialashleycolie, an agent for North American Senior Benefits, which was acquired by Integrity Marketing Group in 2019, making it part of a family of corporate IMOs. Ashley posts on Instagram about trips on chartered boats, yoga classes with her recruits, and making motivational speeches at industry conventions about having “grit over quit.” The finer points of life insurance are not mentioned anywhere—though her posts are saturated instead with consistent pleas to join the team.

The accounts of these individuals, and the companies that they work for, often lean into a hyperbolic vision of masculinity. Prosper Agencies attempts to get people to join their sales team by posting black-and-white reels of shirtless men flexing their biceps and yelling at the camera when they’re not doing synchronized push-ups and running drills at a corporate retreat. Again, life insurance is rarely mentioned; it’s all about “work[ing] hard today so the future is built to last.” Others take their aesthetic cue from the output of travel influencers. On AO Globe Life’s account, one video shows the translucent waters at all-inclusive resorts played over rap music, while another includes an interview talking about “unlimited earning potential.” There are videos of recruits at wineries in Italy, with polished editing and motivational voice-overs. There are Rolex giveaways, branded merch—and vanishingly little discussion of the baroque intricacies of policies.

No matter who you are online, to be successful in life insurance sales, you need to focus on the prime targets: the scared, the newlyweds, and the elderly. These potential buyers live in a world that feels far from the sellers who are young, online, and by no means legally bound to act in their clients’ best interest. This is where the actual product of life insurance makes the social media smoke screen of an effortlessly glamorous life all the more bleak. To be in the business, you need to trade in a certain type of fear: a reminder that life is fragile and catastrophe looms. Who is better suited for this task than a lifestyle influencer? The online personalities projecting prosperity are the most likely to leave viewers with a feeling of a lack of fulfillment or insecurity about their position in life. There is no way to channel fear quite like watching videos of a bunch of twenty-something men running in the woods, chanting about making more money in a week than you make in a year—so why not join them?

Whereas death was once seen as a collective risk to be softened through community obligation, today it’s big business driven by the logic of mercenary individualism. The evolution of life-insurance sales—from church-based mutual aid to door-to-door solicitation, to influencer marketing—reveals, too, that as economies grow more precarious, there is always a greater effort to dress that instability in an illusion of bootstrapping success.

The migration of life insurance into influencer-driven MLM structures also reveals something broader about the platforms that sustain it. Instagram has become a breeding ground for scams, and cracks are beginning to show in its already artificial economy. When lifestyle influencers leverage their “amazing lives” to sell entry into a sales network, the spectacle does more than recruit new agents. It betrays the very charade of being a lifestyle influencer.

The phenomenon of the influencer hawking life insurance is not a categorical shift, but just another notch in a continuum that includes influencers selling anti-aging serums, wellness supplements, and longevity hacks. Social media has long been a repository of promises for self-improvement, peak performance, and extended lifespans. Life insurance has become yet another item in this aspirational marketplace. In the end, it all becomes grist for the attention economy. Unfortunately, as algorithms bury content, commissions thin, and pyramids flatten into an infinite scroll, the search for the next promise will inevitably begin again.